Of the four finalists in the competition, Frank Gehry’s firm seemed to many to be an outlier: although his team had been involved in increasingly large-scale public and cultural projects by this point, Gehry was still largely known for his work with bold forms and experimental, though commonplace materials including chain-link fencing, stucco, cardboard, and unpainted plywood, none of which seemed appropriate to the design of a civic monument like a concert hall. Gehry’s office, however, devised schemes for the Concert Hall which managed to strike a careful balance: refined, yet informal, serious, yet inviting, the design was deemed befitting of a concert hall which would suit the unique cultural landscape of Los Angeles, and a few weeks later in 1988 it was announced as the competition’s winning entry.

Model for Frank Gehry's entry to the Walt Disney Concert Hall Competition

Learning from Precedent

Particularly inspired by Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie, a concert hall which opened in 1963, Gehry’s initial winning scheme employed a vineyard-style seating arrangement, with concertgoers surrounding the orchestra on terraces fanning outward—a strategy Gehry found to produce a unique sense of intimacy among the audience and performers alike. But Gehry’s scheme continued to evolve significantly after his team’s success in the competition.

Berliner Philharmoniker by Hans Scharoun by Alfredo Sánchez Romero is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Model for Frank Gehry's entry to the Walt Disney Concert Hall Competition

Frank Gehry, then-director of the LA Phil Ernest Fleischmann, and a team of acousticians from Nagata Acoustics visited numerous concert halls around the world, attending performances and analyzing their forms through physical and digital modeling.

Finding a Balance

Of the concert halls surveyed, the group found consensus that the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, a late nineteenth-century neoclassical structure designed by architect Adolf Leonard van Gendt, offered the most promise: the hall’s hybrid shoebox arrangement yielded what the group determined to be an ideal balance of acoustics, on one hand, and a feeling of community, on the other. Learning from these precedents, the team landed on a widened shoebox model as the ideal form for their concert hall.

Concert Hall Precedent Study Models in Frank Gehry's Office

Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam © Inno van Lieshout

“The reason I made Disney Hall symmetrical was because I knew that I was a very suspect architect for a building like that by the general public. And so I thought, everybody is going to think I'm going to do a Thing. So I decided to give them a comfort zone.” — Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry with Study Model

Simulating Experience

The visual, spatial, and architectural effects of these design decisions were tested through a series of sectional models at increasingly larger scales. Moving-image video, often spliced with real-life footage, and immersive still photography suggested what the future Concert Hall might look and feel like upon its completion.

Jim Dayton Constructing an Interior Model

Immersive photograph from Interior Model

Video Footage from Interior Model with Real-World Footage Montaged Atop

Scaled Symphony

A one-tenth-scale model was devised to test and confirm the design’s acoustic effects, with no detail spared. Small cloth-wrapped figurines, for example, represented concertgoers whose presence, no doubt, would affect how soundwaves traveled through the hall. The model was pumped full with nitrogen to better mimic atmospheric effects at the reduced scale, and sounds whose frequency had been sped up tenfold were piped in. Acousticians placed sound recorders throughout the model to test how well sound traveled from the stage to various seats, no matter if in the front row or the very back. The results of these tests demonstrated conclusively for the project team that the concert hall design would render it one of the premier spaces for music performance in the world—with no single “best seat” in the house. 

William Ullman Constructing the One-Tenth-Scale Acoustic Testing Model

Michael Matteucci Constructing the One-Tenth-Scale Acoustic Testing Model

Photo by Adam Latham courtesy of LA Phil

Frank Gehry’s team next turned to paper models to understand how these various programmatic and scalar needs could be enwrapped in a single architectural gesture. Initially envisioned as a dynamic form clad in limestone, the building's exterior was later changed to stainless steel—largely owing to aesthetic and budgetary considerations.

handcrafted possibilities

Tape, glue, and strips of paper reveal an ongoing process of adjusting the building’s form, approximating complex curvatures, and considering engineering opportunities and constraints.

Exterior Study Model

Constructing an Exterior Model in Paper and Acrylic

Projecting Form

The challenge for Frank Gehry's team was how to then rationalize and translate these complex three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional projections that could in fact lend themselves to construction at full scale. At first this process was attempted by eye and by hand.

Michael Sant and Alex Meconi Taking two-dimensional projections from three-dimensional model, by hand

Alex Meconi Taking two-dimensional projections from three-dimensional model, by hand

translating Physical to Digital

Digitizing pens and scanning arms allowed technicians to translate coordinate data from hand-built physical models into digital space. The resulting digital models, in turn, were able to generate two-dimensional projections and renderings that could be further manipulated.

Scanning An Exterior Model

Data from Exterior Model Translated into A Digital Model

Scanning An Exterior Model

Scanning An Exterior Model

DIGITAL SKEPTICISM

The team, however, remained somewhat skeptical regarding the use of this new technology, calling into question the fidelity of the digital model to what had been designed by hand. The team undertook an effort to construct what they called a “confirmation model”: the physical design model was scanned into CATIA, and CATIA in turn generated dimensional information that directed construction of a second physical model. The two physical models were compared side by side in order to confirm that what had been translated into CATIA in fact represented what had been initially constructed by hand.

"Confirmation Model" built from CATIA data

Exterior Model with letraset lines printed and pasted atop

DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL, IN CONCERT

As the technical possibilities of digital modeling grew over the course of the design process, the digital became an increasingly key site for the development of the Concert Hall’s design. But physical models nevertheless retained their primary role in this iterative process. Only in combination, the digital and physical could afford new capacities for carrying out the multiple forms of testing, development, and refinement required in order to realize the building's complex structure and form.

EXTERIOR PRESENTATION MODEL

STRUCTURAL MODEL IN CATIA

The design of the Concert Hall, in this way, benefitted from an ongoing, mutually recursive process of feedback between physical and digital modeling — contra narratives which would assume the digital to have replaced the physical outright.

“Among his many accomplishments, Frank Gehry will be remembered as the architect who elevated the organ to be the magnificent centerpiece of his design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall.”

Why an organ?

Why an organ of this magnitude, with its 6,134 pipes towering above the concert hall's stage? Frank Gehry explains this process as a crescendo of ideas. When, at an early stage, he visited Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie, Gehry found himself in awe of Scharoun's organ for the immediate power and dynamic presence it afforded the hall. The organ's rich materiality and Baroque sculptural quality, accentuated by the play of light within its immediate surrounds, strongly appealed to Gehry's vision for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. However, he and the project team sensed that the organ's off-axis placement in the Berlin Philharmonie was acoustically less than ideal, and Gehry sought to devise alternate design solutions in his own scheme for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The setting of the organ on the hall's axis of symmetry thus became essential, as was the creation of an illumination device through which rays of light could bathe the instrument in warm tones from high above. With its playfully curving pipes on its façade—pipes which are in fact functional—the organ embraces the orchestra and audience alike, alluding to the playful dynamism and spirit of invention that Gehry first noticed and admired in Scharoun's organ.

The Organ in the Hall Photo by Adam Latham courtesy of LA Phil

The many pipes which comprise the organ Photo by Adam Latham courtesy of LA Phil

Photo by Adam Latham courtesy of LA Phil

The organ's exuberant form and exceptional sound quality have garnered the instrument numerous affectionate monikers: lovingly referred to as a bouquet of flowers, as a forest of trees, and as a basket of French fries, the organ plays a leading role in numerous concertos and recitals across the LA Phil's annual slate of programming.

Iveta Apkalna Playing the Organ © Paul Cressey Photography

Photo by Adam Latham courtesy of LA Phil